Catch: A netting tutorial.

Well, good afternoon fish fan friends and members of the show. Happy to be with you. We're going to talk today and demonstrate some very important skills that everyone who has fish needs to acquire and or develop, or both develop. And that is, what do you do with this? What is this? What's it good for? A net like that I find of absolutely no value whatsoever. Not even to catch bettas. I'll demonstrate in a few minutes what I mean. I catch bettas with my hand. I don't use a net because a net can damage them. They can flip out. There can be a lot of problems. In addition to which, using a tiny little net like that means you've got to go after the fish. You're running after it, trying to snare it. That's not what a net is for. A net is not a chase instrument. It is a capture instrument. And so rather than this, when I go after a fish, whether it's a one-inch fish or a one-foot fish, I use this. This is a 12-inch fine mesh black net. I like blue and green, but black seems to be the most effective because the fish really don't see it. Now, what do I do with this? I don't chase fish with it. I place it in such a way that I can trap fish typically up against the front of the glass. That's primarily the way I catch fish, by trapping them. I can do this without swishing it around, pulling out plants. I can go into the most heavily planted sands and catch the specific fish I want without disturbing the plants or stirring up the mold. It's a matter of genetics. So I'm going to show you some of the skills that are involved in using a large net. And the first thing we're going to do is we're going to catch a school of six six-inch silver dollars, which are a very fast fish, a very difficult fish to catch. We're moving them from our big 175 acrylic into our 500-gallon tank. So let's get started with this, and then we'll show the use of a net in some other applications. We're going to start with this. We have a camera inside the tank. There's a GoPro in there, underwater. So we're going to get a fish's eye view of how it is captured by the father fish, dreaded black gnat. Here we go. So the idea here is simply to trap the fish in the net. We don't want to chase it. We don't want to frighten it. They are very quick. So you can see what happened there was he got in the net. We'll get three of them in here. Man, they jumped right out. Okay, we're going to have to commit the other one. We have to try to catch this guy. Did we get three or did we get two? Yeah. So we obviously have adopted a technique to get these guys out of the tank. The problem here is that this tank has a four-inch lip on it. So we have to come out from the side in order to get it up. And that creates enough of an opening for the fish to escape from the net. So we're overcoming that. We're overcoming that. Now notice I'm going slowly and gently. I'm not trying to scare the fish. I'm trying to keep them very calm. And there we go. Okay. All right. Okay, so we can cut that off now. A la hachme. You think it's caught? What we have in here are about 20 scarlet baddies. It's a very tiny fish. And these are juveniles, so they're even smaller. They're less than a half an inch long. What we're going to do is we're going to catch five. And I have a little bag here to put them in. Note when I catch fish, I put them directly into a bag in the water that they are in. So let's see what we can find here. Now I'm going to use the largest net to do this because what I want to do is get it all the way to the back, bring it down to the bottom, and just kind of jiggle it a little bit to see if we can get some of these guys to come out front, which they may or may not do. They tend to, when they get frightened, they tend to hide by going deeper into the substrate. I just saw, there's one in a guppy. There's another one. Let's try to clear some of this back. Let's see if we can get at least one here. I count two. All right, I see one and a little bit of gravel. There's a little bit of decorative rock on top. Where'd it go? They're right there. Okay, so hold the bag in front. What I'm going to do, I'm picking this fish up on my finger. It's on my hand. I'm dropping it in. So that's one. Let's see what's on the other side here. I should have my lens for this. There's another one right out in the front. Are you getting it? Yeah, we got him to go to the back. So you note I'm doing this without creating any kind of stress at all. I thought there might have been two. I think it's just one. There's two. You want the net to bag in the back, and then we're just kind of tapping around the bottom in the back here to get something to come up front. I just saw one. There he is, right up front and in the bag. So there's three. You get the idea. We're trying to bring them up to the front of the glass where we can trap them against the front glass in the large net so they never really see the net. Here's a big white skirt. Easily trapped in the net. Let's just move him. Move him down to the next tank. We'll try to get... Let's just see if we can get one more. Now there are a lot of them in here, and I'm not... Oh, here's something else. Got the cooley loach? Yeah, there's a cooley loach in there. That's a whole other can of worms. Trying to catch a cooley loach. The cooley loach I catch by siphoning them. I get them to stop at the front glass, and then I have a siphon ready to go, and I siphon them in. Now it works because the cooley loach is an open-water fish. It's like a riverine fish. So they tend to go in the direction, or the opposite direction of flowing water. In other words, if water is flowing, they'll go up it. They go toward it. I'm sorry. So if you get a siphon going, they'll go right into it. All right. I'm not seeing any more. So with this kind of a process, without tearing the tank up, it goes a little slower. I'm not seeing any right now. I've got things a little stirred up. So let's just stop. We may come back to it later. I just saw something else in there. Here he is. Oh, this is a guppy. Got a little guppy tossing up there. Okay. I do have a smaller net. I can use the smaller net. This one, I find the bigger net works better generally because my goal here is not to chase the fish around, but to simply trap it against the front of the glass. I'm not seeing anything else here. Okay. Let's try something simpler. Why don't you dump those back in there? And then we're going to go down, and we're going to try... Let's do... Hi there. Let's do some of these... The geos? No, not the geos. Well, we could use the geos. I was thinking about the rasboras. Are you on? Are we ready? No, I never stop recording. Okay. So we've got larger fish here. Basically, what I'm going to try to do is trap them against the front of the glass and direct them. I've got the net angled, so I just chase two of them directly into the net. And of the two that I chased in, I managed to... Oh, there's the other one. It's under the plant. There we go. Right there. So we got a little... That's a rice fish. A little rice fish. Okay. So, again, let's give you a clearer view. We're putting the net in the back of the tank, and then without stirring things up, just moving it forward, tapping it a little, we just caught six fish out of a planted tank. Can you see them? Okay. Easy peasy. No stress, no mess. Here's a betta. Watch this. I don't know if I can get... I'm probably not tall enough to do this. Come with my bare hands. That's a beautiful one, too. That's a pretty betta. Okay. So, let's go over here and we'll catch a couple of goldfish, show you how to do that. We're going to do that by hand as well. We just walked in. Somebody just walked in. Yeah, she's still here. She's still here.